Wednesday, June 29, 2005

According to a study, conducted on behalf of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, 81% of academic researchers is willing to comply with a mandate to publish their work in an open access repository.

This does not seem to have much of an impact on traditional publishers like Elsevier Science. They already support open archiving, limited however to the researcher's own web site or a repository owned by the researcher's employer.

The questions still are:

Will traditional publishers allow for depositing research in third party repositories? Not likely.

Will search engines (including Google Scholar) improve to make the matter of where the archiving occurs irrelevant? Seems likely.

Will the open archiving movement stimulate open access as a publishing model? Not for a while.